The David-and-Goliath story of a generation that set out to reclaim its dignity by taking on corporate America.
Since the Great Recession, recent college grads have confronted an alarming reality: the economic engine that propelled earlier generations into the middle class has nearly stalled out. More and more workers with a degree have faced crushing debt and settled for jobs far below their qualifications.
The anger of this college-educated working class finally boiled over in 2021, when workers at two Starbucks in Buffalo shocked corporate America by voting to unionize. Not long after, the veteran New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber met Teddy Hoffman, a charming, capable college grad and seven-year Starbucks employee in Chicago, who was inspired by Buffalo to rise up and unionize his own store.
While following Hoffman and his cohort as their spontaneous-seeming rebellion spread far and wide—to college-educated workers at Starbucks cafes and Apple Stores, across video-game studios and even Hollywood—Scheiber realized he was witnessing something deep and lasting. Mutiny is the revelatory account of a generation made confident by their historic educational achievements, only to become disillusioned when their degrees yielded far less than they were taught to expect.
Scheiber paints a portrait of this new working class with assiduous detail and striking empathy while telling the dramatic story of its revolt against the status quo.
"One of the most thought-provoking books I've read in the past year . . . Scheiber presents a series of incisively reported profiles of young people who did everything they were asked to do but still found themselves working at a Starbucks or in an Amazon warehouse. Their discontent, Scheiber concludes, isn't explicitly economic or cultural or political but, rather, is what happens when people with degrees realize that what they thought was a temporary postgraduate job will almost certainly become their career. "
